Critical Essay by Dominic Rainsford

In the following essay, Rainsford studies characters in Little Dorrit who were adversely affected by childhood trauma well into middle age.

Dickens's early novels typically end with the principal characters finding a home, a physical refuge from their problems. In later Dickens, characters tend to have to fall back, more movingly, on the resources of a toughened mind, and they have to be prepared to forgo tangible rewards. Louisa Gradgrind, in Hard Times (1854), represents a bleak version of this renunciation. In Little Dorrit (1855-57), on the other hand, something of the cheerful perseverance of a Mark Tapley—which, in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), had seemed to condemn that individual to being comic and secondary—can be detected in the readiness...